Ii have been slow walking/reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being.  In the chapter on ‘Collaboration‘ he remarks:

The purpose of the work [of art] is to awaken something in you first, and then allow something to be awakened in others.  And it’s fine if they’re not the same thing. We can only hope that the magnitude of the charge we experience reverberates as powerfully as it does for us. (Rubin 90-91)

He notes that the work might be found art like Duchamp’s urinal or bike wheel. He called them ‘readymades’.  I think this concept might be a really effective way to awaken the art within you.  This poem below was inspired by a knot I made and used in the garden to anchor a plum tree that was leaning from a windstorm. This readymade sprung from an early memory of helping my dad secure a canoe to our car. That knot was awesome and was a marvelous entry trick for fishing with my father, a memory stake in my mind’s garden.

My point is that anyone can allow and note these collaborations with memory.  In my instance I did not neglect to write down the memory as I recalled it and then elaborated on it.  Poetry, n’est-ce pas.  The French expression leads us to an English pun, does it knot?  And so poetry evoketh all the way down like windchimes in the spring.

A knot,
my father’s knot,
it had a name once,
but not now.
I only know
it was perfect
for securing a canoe
on roof racks.
It never failed.
So now I use it
to cinch up an ancient plum tree,
root-balled.
My father is gone.
His knot isn’t.
It carries on
like a spell
in my own grimoire,
majicked & remaining,
charged & still holdng
to the bitter end.